The present invention relates to a low power radio network and particularly to creating logical pairing links between master and slave devices.
In known radio networks the creation of logical pairing links is typically done in one of two ways.
In the first way all the slave devices can only communicate with the master device, which constitutes a xe2x80x9chubxe2x80x9d and messages are not routed. Thus the xe2x80x9chubxe2x80x9d must be the focus for all of the slave devices and any message from a slave device can only have one possible target the xe2x80x9chubxe2x80x9d. (An example of this would be a radio security system where the control box is the xe2x80x9chubxe2x80x9d and all devices communicate only with the control box). The disadvantages of this type of system are that the xe2x80x9chubxe2x80x9d of the network has to be a dedicated unit that has knowledge of each device and how the system should interact and without the xe2x80x9chubxe2x80x9d the network cannot exist.
In the second way a user has to create all the logical links usually through the actuation of dip-switches. In this system the concept of a master-slave network is removed and every message is broadcast as a network broadcast for anyone to receive and interpret if they want to. The user chooses what group a slave device should be part of and in turn the user decides what group they want the switch to control. The disadvantages of this system are as follows:
The device needs to have a set of user accessible dip-switches, the effect of this is to increase the component count, hardware cost and limit the design packaging.
The user needs to have knowledge of all the current devices on the network and their addresses so that he can assign a new device a new unused address.
If the user makes a mistake with the dipxe2x80x94switches then the only feedback that the user will get is the device not working.
The lack of a network manager device means there is no security. Anyone can set up any device to work on your network.
The network has no xe2x80x9cmanager devicexe2x80x9d that can control the use of the radio waves thus there is no guarantee in channel availability.
An object of the present invention is to facilitate the creation of logical pairing links between devices on a low power radio network.
According to one aspect of the present invention there is provided a method of creating logical functional links in a master-slave radio network comprising a master radio device having a routing table and a plurality of enumerated slave devices, at least one of said slave devices having an inputting device and others of said slave devices being associated with end user devices compatible with the inputting device, the method comprising placing the radio network into a pairing mode in which the master device successively activates the compatible end user devices in accordance with a predetermined sequence, actuating the inputting device in response to activating at least a predetermined one of the compatible end user devices, and creating a functional link between the inputting device and the predetermined end user device in the routing table.
According to a second aspect of the present invention there is provided a low power radio network comprising a master radio device having a routing table and a plurality of enumerated slave devices, at least one of said slave devices having an inputting device and others of said slave devices being associated with end user devices compatible with the inputting device, wherein the routing table comprises at least one functional link between the inputting device and a predetermined one of the end user devices.
The method in accordance with the present invention enables communication to be possible between any device and any other device on a network although the topology is a master-slave network. The master-slave network allows one master device to be responsible for the network and also means that the slave devices do not need to have any information about the other slave devices on the network. Further, a slave device is able to communicate with another slave device on the network without the master device having any knowledge of the message content.